East Germans 'begged Moscow to send in the tanks in 1953'

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

12:01AM BST 15 Jul 2001

NEW evidence has revealed that instead of being "invaded" by the Soviet Union during the 1953 anti-communist uprising in the former East Germany, the country's Stalinist rulers actually begged Moscow to send in the tanks.

The revelations are an embarrassment to Germany's reform communists as they try to win control of Berlin in this autumn's municipal elections and are courted nationally by the ruling Social Democrats.

The material, which will be published this month in Uprising in East Germany 1953, by Christian Ostermann, an American historian at the National Security Archive in Washington, undermines the accepted view that the East German Communist Party was the Kremlin's "puppet" and simply took orders from Moscow.

An estimated 125 East German workers were shot dead and hundreds more wounded during the brutal suppression of the uprising - the first of its kind in a Warsaw Pact country. Until now, blame for the killings had been attributed to the Soviet Union alone.

However, hitherto unpublished material from former Soviet archives, detailing a telephone conversation between the then Soviet High Commissioner for East Germany, Vladimir Semjonov, and the Soviet defence minister, Nikolai Bulganin, suggests otherwise.

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It reveals that East Germany's leader, Walter Ulbricht, specifically requested Soviet military assistance to help put down the uprising which reached its high point on June 17, 1953.

The records show that in the early hours of that morning, Semjonov told Moscow that he had agreed to put tanks on the streets "at the request of our German friends" and that he had also committed Soviet forces to "maintain order" in the "exceptional circumstances of emergency" that ensued.

Today's heirs to the former East German Communist Party, the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS), are already the subject of intense public criticism because of their failure to apologise for the consequences of the Berlin Wall.

The PDS insisted last week that the "communist" interpretation for the appearance of Soviet tanks on Berlin's streets remained the correct one.

It is already deeply divided over its predecessor's role in building the infamous Wall in 1961 and its responsibility for shooting dead more than 200 people as they attempted to escape to the West.

With the approach of the 40th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall next month, the party last week officially distanced itself from "Stalinist socialism" which led to its construction.

However, in attempting to appease the party's "old guard" - the hardline communists who make up more than half of its 86,000 members - it failed to apologise for the consequences of the Wall which led to 16 million East Germans being all but imprisoned in their communist state for 28 years.